Chapter Text
The circus, at the root of it all, is anything but glamorous.
After all, cramming a few hundred people into a tent that smells like elephant shit and sweat and then letting them watch a bunch of college dropouts light things on fire and do backflips 30 feet in the air is not something one would typically think of when asked to provide an example of glamor.
And perhaps that is the greatest beauty of the circus, that glorious art of taking something ugly and freakish and twisting it into something enticing, something mysterious, something glamorous.
Jack Zimmermann had never felt particularly glamorous himself. Not when he was a chubby kid, standing next to his father who held the world in his calloused hands, or his mother who shone brighter than the big top spotlights. Not when he was in his prime, an overzealous teenager with too many possibilities, too much pressure on his shoulders; an Icarus on his tightrope. Certainly not after his inevitable fall.
Even now, in his nicest suit (“Too much?”, he’d asked Shitty hours before), standing with arms outspread and a smile to match his father’s, with the heat of the spotlights and the weight of a thousand eyes on him, he couldn’t help but feel a shadow of who he was meant to be.
But people didn’t pay money to come watch a shadow. They came to see glamorous.
So Jack Zimmermann, ringleader of the Cirque du Samwell, sucked in a huge breath and let out a booming, “Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls...welcome to the greatest show on Earth.”